My kids have recently become enamored of the TV show Leverage, watching it via Hulu and Netflix. If you're not familiar with the series, it's basically an updated Mission: Impossible. Each episode centers on an elaborate caper performed by our slightly shady heroes, typically aimed at righting some wrong.
To make the episodes interesting, the plans always involve some disguise and misdirection, some crawling-through-the-lasers intrusion, occasionally some (nonlethal) punch-ups, and of course the now inevitable scenes of the team's ace hacker typing madly on his computer while it makes a variety of irritating electronic noises.
It struck me as I listened to an episode from the next room that the heroes of Leverage are one prosthetic hand and some mirror sunglasses away from being characters from a cyberpunk science fiction story or roleplaying game. Back in 1990 or so a group of players running a GURPS Cyberpunk or Cyberpunk 2020 game would almost certainly include a disguise/fast talk expert, a combat specialist, an agile thief, and an elite hacker. The main difference is that modern hackers use wireless networks from a nearby van instead of sneaking into the bad guy's stronghold to find a physical connection.
I've decided that the prevalence of elite hackers in modern thrillers is actually an example of wishful thinking, almost as if contemporary action stories also included flying cars and Moon bases. In the real world, security systems are not usually part of a wireless network -- precisely because their designers aren't stupid and don't want some nerd with a laptop trying to fool with them. Recent big real-world robberies like this one tend to rely on more old-school methods like sticking a gun in someone's face and running away real fast after you grab the loot.
And real-life cybercrime is a lot less interesting than it is in fiction: it's sending out billions of bogus Nigerian emails hoping to find half a dozen people gullible enough to reveal their bank account numbers. It's setting up porn sites to get credit card numbers. It's petty and banal and kind of dull.
But in fiction we want to see the elite hacker making fools of the bad guys. We want to believe that cleverness and technical skill are on the side of virtue. And we want to fantasize about making a Big Score armed with nothing but fast typing skills and a copy of Windows For Dummies. I suspect that was part of the fundamental appeal of cyberpunk fiction back in the 1980s: the idea that a nerd with a computer (no laptops back then) could be as dangerous and cool as any hard-muscled Mob soldier. Nerds with computers really want that to be true.
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